Alum may be tapped for U.N. post
By Fan Zhang, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Friday, July 31, 2009
Eileen Donahoe ’81
President Obama may appoint Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe ’81 as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, according to several media sources. Donahoe, an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, is the wife of John Donahoe ’82, vice chair of the Board of Trustees and CEO of Ebay, Inc.
Sources close to Obama said Donahoe would be named for the position, Le Temps, a leading Swiss newspaper, reported earlier this month. IP Watch, an intellectual property industry newsletter, reported that Donahoe was a likely candidate on Wednesday.
When reached on Thursday, Donahoe said she could not comment on the issue.
Michael Parmly, chief communications officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva said these reports were unsubstantiated, according to GenevaLunch, an online newspaper for the Geneva region.
“The White House has yet to announce its nominee for the post of Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva,” he told GenevaLunch. “Until it does, all speculation as to who that nominee will be remains just that — speculation,”
The new ambassador will play an important role come September, according to Le Temps. Obama announced on March 31 that the United States would seek election to the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council. The United States had boycotted the body since its formation in 2006, and the Bush Administration criticized the council for its repeated condemnation of Israel.
If appointed, Donahoe would have to be reviewed by the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and then confirmed by the full Senate. Donahoe would take over for Douglas Griffiths, the deputy permanent representative for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. Griffiths has been serving as the interim representative since January 2009, when he succeeded Bush-appointee Warren Tichenor.
At Stanford, Donahoe researches humanitarian military intervention. She was a major fundraiser for Obama, reportedly raising at least $500,000 for his election campaign, and was chair of the National Women for Obama Finance Committee.
In early 2009, she was named “woman of the year” by Emerge, a training program aimed at increasing the number of Democratic women in public office.
Donahoe majored in English and American Studies at Dartmouth.
She was a member of Sigma Kappa sorority and competed for the track team, according to her profile on the Class of 1981 web site.
After graduation, Donahoe went on to earn a masters in ethics from Harvard University. She graduated with a law degree from Stanford Law School and a masters in East Asian studies from Stanford University in 1989.
After law school, Donahoe clerked for U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick of the Northern District of California. She has also served as a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and as a litigation attorney at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, Calif.
Donahoe, who also studied Chinese at the College, later spent a year at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. She earned a doctorate in ethics and social theory from the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union.
She and her husband have four children — Jack, Thomas ’09, Catherine and Kevin.
The State Department declined to comment for this article.